Page 42
I know where you're competing. I know your schedule. The people I work for are less patient than I am, and you've used up what patience I had.
Neil's leverage has only piled up since the first envelope he handed me behind the chutes. My parole, the coerced deliveries, and now the warrant. What's changed is the ceiling. Before, Neil was keeping a coerced courier compliant. Now he's containing a liability, and the corridor doesn't keep liabilities on the books for long.
Screenshotting both messages, I preserve the number, and forward copies to the encrypted email account I set up at the Deming library. Then I mute the thread and leave the originals untouched. If someone takes my phone, the copies survive.
I walk toward the competitor bar at the edge of the fairground. The left side of my face is tightening where the fist landed, and the taste of blood has faded to a metallic film between my teeth.
The bar is a converted horse trailer with a plywood counter and string lights looped across the serving window. Riders and stock hands fill the space between the trailer and the fence rail, standing in loose clusters with bottles and plastic cups. Country music plays from a phone speaker propped on a cooler lid, and the laughter carries the particular volume of people who've been drinking since the last performance ended.
Clint is at the counter. His phone is gone. The grin is back, wide and easy, aimed at a woman leaning against the plywood with a beer in her hand. She's young, traveling the circuit, the type who follows the rodeo for the weekend and stays for the party. Her friend is two stools down, distracted by a bull rider telling a story with his hands.
He's paying attention to the friend's position. I watch him check the distance between the two women, gauge how long before the friend finishes her conversation and comes looking. The assessment is casual, and nobody would read it as anything other than a friendly cowboy keeping the conversation going. I read it because I've stood where he's standing, on the other side of the transaction, steering introductions that looked social and weren't.
He leans closer. The woman laughs and touches his arm. He says something near her ear that makes her tilt toward him, and the body language shifts from open-bar friendly to directed. He's guiding her attention the way a hazer guides a steer: steady pressure, nothing she'd pull away from, nothing she'd remember deciding.
Clint catches my eye across the bar and lifts his cup. The gesture is the same one he's given me at every event on the circuit. Casual, practiced, the salute of someone who buys rounds and remembers names and never makes anyone uncomfortable.
The woman beside him doesn't know that Penny knew his name. She doesn't know that Sandy left a Lubbock bar with him and ended up in a culvert outside Santa Rosa.
The photographs matter. The carrier numbers matter. The case I'm building matters.
None of it is worth another woman in a culvert.
I set my water down on the fence rail and walk toward the counter. Clint sees me coming and the grin adjusts, recalibrating for a new audience. He has no idea I've been building a record of his truck beside rigs that don't belong to any real company. He doesn't know the authorization codes on those rigs connect to Steve Hendricks's office.
He thinks the friendly cowboy routine works on everyone.
"Carrick." He lifts his cup. "Buy you a round?"
"Quinn's looking for you." I keep my voice flat and easy, the tone of a man delivering a message he doesn't care about. "Something about the draw sheet for tomorrow."
The lie is simple, boring, and impossible to refuse without looking strange. Clint glances at the woman, flashes her the smile, and says he'll be right back. He won't. By the time he finds Quinn and discovers there's no draw-sheet issue, the woman will have reconnected with her friend. The window Clint was building will have closed.
I lean against the counter and catch the friend's eye two stools down. "Your friend was looking for you."
The friend abandons the bull rider and moves back to the woman's side. They're talking before Clint reaches the competitor lot.
When he reaches the lot Quinn will tell him there was no draw-sheet problem. Clint will do the math before the night is over.
Sandy looked back from a doorway in Lubbock, and I didn't move. Tonight I moved.
By morning, Clint will want to know why I sent him on a wild goose chase.
12
MORGAN
My ASAC doesn't call it leverage. He calls it operational flexibility, which is the Bureau phrase for using a person's survival instinct against them while maintaining the paperwork trail that lets everyone sleep at night.
I'm standing in his borrowed office at the Albuquerque field division with my back to the window and my hands folded because folding them keeps them still. The blinds behind me throw parallel lines of light across the carpet and his desk and the open file that contains what's left of my operational cover.
"Carroll, your field identity is compromised. The vehicle registration trace means whoever ran it now has the procurement account and the front company. Western Range Mutual is finished."
"I flagged that risk in my last report."
"You flagged it. I'm acting on it." He leans back and picks up a printout from the stack beside his coffee, a single page I can read upside down from where I stand. Case correspondence. The parole authority's letterhead. "I've spoken to the supervising authority this morning. We're withdrawing the request for deferred service of Carrick's parole violation warrant."
The floor beneath me shifts without moving.
